


Ds. (in loving memory, amen.)

by arurun



Series: not so human after all. [4]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death, Competent Buggy (One Piece), Gen, Immortality, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Gore, Non-Linear Narrative, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26530933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arurun/pseuds/arurun
Summary: The Ds can't die, but that's a secret.
Series: not so human after all. [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634437
Comments: 16
Kudos: 133





	1. three brothers.

**Author's Note:**

> this has been sitting around my drafts for way too long haha xD there are minor changes in relationships, but I still don't know if I want to add any canon divergences to this. Anyways, I'll just leave this here because if not, it'll be dusty in my docs. I'll come back to it one day. Enjoy :)

Dadan noticed something wrong about Ace really quickly.

She was never mother material. Hell, she never had a mom of her own, so Garp must’ve been on  _ something _ when he impulsively decided that Dadan would make a good caretaker for his grandson-not-quite that was barely a month old.

Sure, it was a good secret hideout, but Dadan gave up on discipline pretty quickly. 

But she resigned from that thinking eventually. Surely, Garp knew what he was doing. Surely, this kid was tough enough to survive these conditions.

(He wasn’t.)

And that’s how Dadan found Ace one day, laying in a pool of something much too red, a limb too far out, his blanket scattered around stained and muddy.. 

Wolves? Tigers? Or maybe the bears, it could be any of those huge beasts in Mount Corvo. If Magra hadn’t spotted and chased away the beast when he did, there would be nothing left of the child.

She had put one of the newbies in the charge of the kid. And they had ‘accidentally lost him’, as they so drunkenly put it.

(Dadan will show him later, what it means to disobey the rules of the Dadan house.)

She got on her knees, picking up the toddler’s so little, so lifeless figure-- and she bit back the tears. She already knew this family game was in vain. Why did she hope?

Dogra looked away as Dadan brought the child to her chest and mourned.

( _ Thump. Thump. _ )

Her eyes blown wide, her hands trembling against the cold, cold,  _ cold _ \-- there was a heartbeat. A small, but strong,  _ and getting stronger _ \-- heartbeat.

She swore loudly.

“He’s still alive!” she ordered, “we’re going back, Dogra! Take that arm with us!” 

“Wha-- y- yes, Boss!”

-

Dadan told only Dogra.

They had been flustered-- they knew emergency first aid for what it’s worth, but they knew nothing of bones severed to this point. 

But when they looked closer-- and noticed that the wound, not only was it no longer bleeding-- it was  _ sealing,  _ they knew then that they had to act.

They set the limb back in place, awkward, but together. Stitches were too weak, so they bound it with duct tape, and prayed.

By morning, Ace was crying for milk, lifting his weak little arms about and punching Dadan in his hungry demands.

Dadan cried in relief.

Dogra sobbed, and then he threw up outside.

-

The next time Garp came by, he asked Dadan about the boy’s disfigured left arm. 

The arm was set in the right direction, but the elbow jutted out strangely and the joint occasionally came loose when Ace put strength in the wrong places. 

Explanations later, Garp came home with a new elbow brace for his boy.

Then, Garp told Dadan and Dogra about the story behind the scar around his left eye. It led to the story of the other Ds he knew and the mysterious phenomenon behind their lives-- down to the bloody detail, pack and parcel picked apart.

“I’m only telling you this because you already know,” Garp clarified, booking uncharacteristically serious. “But you can’t tell anyone when it’s unprompted and unnecessary. Got it? You’re supposed to act like you don’t know, even if you do.”

When Dadan asked why, Garp couldn’t answer it well.

“There’s just something inherently wrong with it, with everything about this,” he said, clutching his chest in an almost conflicted way-- like he can’t quite explain it himself. “And I don’t want to figure out why.”

His instincts just warned him against it, so he didn’t challenge it. For someone like Garp, who always raised middle fingers at rules and boundaries-- that was awfully unusual. 

“Call it the will of the D. We can’t defy it.”

Needless to say, Dogra slept with Magra every night after that. 

-

Dadan watched her boy grow up, and she couldn’t bear it. They’ve already messed up once taking care of him, and though the kid wouldn't know a thing about it, Dadan remembered clearly how fearful she felt that day she saw him in pieces. 

She kicked out every bandit that disagreed with her, and decided that she would be, however awful, a  _ mother _ for this child.

Of course, it’s survival of the fittest here. Work for your own keep, first come first serve, hierarchy, and all that. But above it all, Ace deserved to have his hand held and led through the strife.

And that’s what all of them took turns to be-- clumsy, awkward, and awful babysitters.

-

“Dadan,” Ace came home one day, heading straight to the boss’ room, “I’m bleeding.”

Ace could handle a nick or two, but Dadan planted one very firm idea in his head-- and that was ‘if you think you stopped breathing somewhere, get back here’.

Dadan turned around, one arm already headed toward the first aid kit-- and when she saw Ace at the doorway she choked painfully on her cigarette. 

“ACE, WHAT THE FUCK.” 

Ace blinked and sighed. “Yeah, it stopped bleeding but it kinda still hurts.” His left hand was gory and red from the thing in his palm. “I have my eye here--” someone behind them screamed, “--stop overreacting. Anyways, Dadan...”

The woman had her face buried in her palm.

“Dogra--”

“No! Boss, no!” the little man yelled, vehemently denying, arms held before him in a large X, “not me! I did the ear last time! You’re doing that one!” 

“If you’re not gonna help me, I’m just gonna do it myself in the mirror,” Ace groaned. Then he mumbled, “you’re the one that told me not to do it myself cause I’ll fit it back upside down like last time.”

“Alright alright, Ace, I’ll do it, come back here!” 

Thus was their, very chaotic, daily routine.

* * *

_ Ds don’t just defy death. They tend to attract them from their surroundings. _

_ If you would call ‘freak incidents’ and ‘accidental deaths’ a quota the Grim Reaper has to reach each month, they make a habit of taking their dues from the nearest D in the area.  _

_ So word has it that if a place has a low mortality rate, there’s probably a D in the area. _

Or so, Sabo has read..

There is only one book in the Goan Royal Library that tells of this, and it was a crusty old book horribly maintained, falling off the spine, and too many pages aren’t legible. 

(He had only been there because his father wanted to acquaint him with the princess, who in turn feigned an illness to avoid meeting him.)

In the older shelves that no one has bothered to dust in ages, Sabo fell in love with one book without a title nor an author’s name.

It’s a logbook-- and the incomplete lines of the ending indicates that the man died suddenly.

Sabo read it only once, and just those three to four lines that could make up one decent paragraph at most. 

Perhaps, because it was a book that wasn’t supposed to be there, it was removed from the library therein. Sabo never found it again.

(There is nothing to indicate that the story has any factual evidence. It could be fantasiacal, it could be metaphorical. With how old the book is, maybe it’s some old magic that eventually died out anyways. Sabo couldn’t tell, can’t tell even now.)

(But the curiosity stuck in his head, always.)

-

Anticlimactically enough, the curiosity faded immediately after he met one. 

Mainly because, well, Sabo walked in on Ace picking up his own innards from the ground and slotting them back into his stomach, muttering annoyedly to himself like the action was a complete inconvenience rather than a need.

Sabo’s first reaction was to scream and run, then trip hard over a tree root, smack his head against the ground, and fall unconscious.

Then he woke up and Ace was still there, taping the hole in his stomach close.

“Stop that! What even is that?!” Sabo snapped, despite everything. “What are you holding?!”

Ace looked up, surprised to see the boy awake. “Huh? Uh, duct tape,” he held up the blue tape in his hand.

“Why the hell are you holding  _ duct tape _ in your pocket?”

“Well, what else is going to keep my guts from spilling out?”

“A fucking hospital!?”

Sabo was going to  _ cry _ . 

“Geez you’ve been nothing but screaming since you woke up.”

“And whose fault is that?” Sabo snapped back, standing up quickly, “oh, enough already! I don’t care if you’re fucking immortal or whatever, that wound’s going to be infected. Come with me.”

“Huh? Why should I?” Ace scrunched up his face, irritated. “Who the fuck even are you anyway?”

“I’m Sabo, and unless you want your  _ fucking skin to rot off _ , you better get off your bloody ass and come with me!” he raised his voice. 

Maybe it’s because Sabo’s fierce, exhausted-sounding threat reminded Ace of Dadan, but the boy got up obediently, and they travelled the rest of the way through the forest until they reached Sabo’s hideout. 

And so began their strange friendship.

Not ideal, but it’s how the best ones begin.

-

Sabo knew how to clean a wound, but only in theory. 

So a month or so after meeting Ace, Sabo found himself following Ace to the Dadan House, where he was not-so-ceremoniously introduced to Ace’s kinda-scary Mom.

“So you’re Sabo, I’ve heard of you,” Dadan considered him, smoking carefully, “heard you’re one hell of an obnoxious brat.”

Sabo chuckled, “I’ve also heard that you’re a shitty old hag,” he said, “oh! But I’ve also heard you’re actually really nice and a total softie, too.”

“Who the hell are you calling a softie, brat?!”

“He sewed my gut wound shut just now,” Ace offered on his way to the kitchen.

“Oh really?” Dadan turned to Sabo, eyes lighting up, “you have my thanks for that.”

“See?” Ace poked his head back in from the doorway, “total softie.”

Sabo sparkled. 

Dadan’s face heated right up, “damn it, Ace! Get back to work already!” Dadan exploded, “get out of the house or you’re both going into the pot today!”

“Okay, old hag.”

“Bye, old hag! We’ll be back with dinner!” 

-

A number of years after they’d gotten used to living life literally at the edge, Garp comes by and deposits their third in their midst. 

Luffy grinned and greeted them.

Ace did not like needing to babysit, so he first went through all the possible ways to lose him-- which included dropping him into the verge, leaving him to the alligators, and tossing him into the old eagle’s nest.

It was funny and amusing at first. Then it just became worrying.

Dadan put her foot down on their attitudes after Luffy lost too many important bits too many times, but nothing really changed for real until Bluejam.

“Are you two absolute idiots?!”

Ace and Luffy sat on their knees, and Sabo yelled to high hell.

Ace had to duct tape his jaw to his ear, another messy tape-and-cloth combo holding his left shoulder to his torso. Sabo’s going to need Dadan’s help to set the spine back properly later. 

Luffy had to be wrapped everywhere, stitched somewhere, and there was duct tape sticking two halves of him together. And he had to have an eye fitted back in. Seriously, why do they keep popping out? Are they dogs?

Sabo got away with a few nasty scrapes, a broken bone and a couple really bad bruises, but on top of it he had to do _ all that _ and his eyes are absolutely bloodshot. 

“I get it! You can’t  _ fucking  _ die!” he raised his voice. “But it hurts! Right?” 

He snapped at Ace, and Ace, in his panic, nods twice.

“Yeah!” Sabo threw his hands up. “So what are you? Are you two bloody  _ masochists _ ?! Why do you keep running right into dying situations? Are you fucking masochists?!” he said it twice, because that’s how exasperated he was.

Luffy tried to say something, but Sabo stopped him.

“I’m not listening to any of your circumstantial bullshit any longer,” he said.

“Uh- uhm, what does circle stance mean--”

“Both of you!” Sabo yelled, raising his finger as he issued the final warning, “the next  _ fucking _ time I see you two doing some shit like that...”

The contemplative moment he takes feels like suffocation.

Sabo looked up. “ _ I’ll fucking murder you _ .”

Despite literally dying a couple of times every day, the D brothers felt that threat passing cold and terrifying right through their entire spine. 

“Am I clear?!” Sabo barked.

“Y- Yes, sir!” they chorused back immediately.

-

They exchanged sake cups. They became brothers.

Then Sabo’s father came. And then the terminal burned.

Ace and Luffy scraped the edge twice, burned to death once, but they breathed again and crawled out, and then rested until they were good as new.

Meanwhile, Dogra watched as Sabo burned in cannon fire, and inevitably drowned in the wreckage after that.

(Sabo was not a D. If he’s dead, he stays down..)

(Or so they thought.)


	2. two cabin boys.

Shanks never quite knew what was wrong with his captain.

But at the very least, he knew something was wrong. 

From the way Roger was negligent of his own wounds yet so overprotective of theirs-- and in the way Buggy would hook nervously to Roger when he was threatened, or when Buggy would begin to take after Crocus in yelling and dragging him toward the infirmary. 

Shanks looked up to Roger the most, but he knew Buggy the best.

And yet, there were things Buggy never told him. There were things Buggy had nightmares about that he would keep s secret-- and Buggy never kept secrets from him.

It was painful.

But Shanks watched his Captain’s head fall to the ground and respected his desire to hide it to the bitter end.

-

Until he met Monkey D. Luffy, and found out the secret of the Ds.

After an incident involving literally stabbed-out eyes, Shanks found himself receiving explanations from the barmaid with the patience of an angel as they worked to fit his eye back in and sew up his eye in the process.

“Are Ds just more resilient than most?” he wondered. “Garp was like that too. Hole in his side and he just gathered his own intestines like it’s nothing. Gave me nightmares when I was young.”

Makino had chuckled at that. “I suppose you could call it resilience. It’s quite frightening at first, but you get used to it. They’re used to it, too.”

And then Makino began to explain.

About the mortal wounds that would heal as long as they were stuck closely together. About the body parts that had to be put together quickly or they would fuse wrongly. 

About Garp’s missing lungs, that had to be removed a long time ago but he could still breathe, still shout, still run and chase his grandson around the woods. 

And then things began to make sense. 

-

There was a man in the Grand Line who held his head in his hand. The Marines named him Dullahan, assuming it was a trick of his yet unidentified Devil Fruit.

And there was once a rumour of a man who donated all the organs in his body and walked away with the money, alive and well. 

A corpse under the sea that was retrieved and began to breathe. 

A man sealed in a block of ice for centuries, finally defrosted, and woke up without a broken cell in his body.

There are many others in this thread, treated as legends of the Grand Line people would investigate and come up with more questions than answers.

There were many more mysterious things in this sea, so no one really took a closer look to realize that most, if not all of those people had a D in their name. 

-

“Ray-san.” 

He found the man in the bar, and seated beside him.

“How did Captain Roger die?”

Rayleigh paused, the glass an inch away from his face. Then he looked at the redhead and just laughed.

Shanks hated that laugh. It was warm, but it always meant that Rayleigh thought he knew better. It’s not a bad thing-- Shanks just hated to be left in the dark. 

He was tired of it. 

He was tired of needing to figure things out before receiving an explanation. 

He was a slow person-- he wasn’t sharp or observant like Buggy. Shanks wanted to know things, even the things he never realized were happening. He wanted to know the things he had the right to know.

He was old enough to deserve that much, and many failed to figure that out.

After a moment of silence, Rayleigh set his glass on the tale, expressions turning solemn in the dim light.

“I’m not so sure how to answer this question myself,” Rayleigh admitted. “I’m not a D after all. I don’t know much of how it works.”

Shakky gave him a glass of what looks like whiskey, but Shanks didn’t take it.

“Wounds heal, but illnesses stay,” Rayleigh explained “Even if you cut off their heads, they live without it. He could die from an illness, but he'll be breathing again. So if there was anything that could kill a D, what could it be?”

Shanks didn’t know what Rayleigh was implying.

So Rayleigh spelled it out for him.

“Roger fulfilled his last voyage, Shanks,” he said. “Then he died, because he wanted to.”

_Oh._

Oh.

Shanks found himself regretting, just slightly, that he learned the truth.

-

“Shanks!”

“Shit-- get the doc! Doc!”

Luffy was crying and calling him an idiot. Makino was flustered, and Benn looked the most worried he’s ever been. 

And it hurt.

More so than anything else in the world to that point, Shanks couldn't hold back the periodical grunts, the laboured breathing, and the burning, burning, _burn_ in his arm.

No, not his arm. His arm was gone.

Eaten.

“I’m fine.”

“No, shit, you’re fucking not.”

-

_Why did you save him?_ Would be the question his mind asks him later, when his head is clear. _Luffy won’t die. He will live through this pain and adapt to it much easier._

He’s already desensitized to the fact that Ds are immortal. 

His head was trying to convince him that Luffy would, _could_ live with a mortal wound, so why not let the kid get hurt, because either way they could save him later?

Shanks wanted to throw up. He was disgusted by himself.

He began to understand Buggy’s self-hatred, just a little better. 

-

He put his hat on Luffy’s head.

“There you go, buddy,” he said. “Live strong.”

Luffy grinned back.

Shanks felt a little better, but it will never be fine again. Not for himself.

-

Shanks didn’t tell a soul.

He knew why Captain Roger hid the fact. So he kept a hand on his straw hat and kept the words to himself.

It’s better if the world didn’t learn of this-- this unbearably _sad_ monstrosity in their midst.

* * *

Not many people knew that Gol D. Roger was dying before he did.

Literally, a few hundred times, every day.

Aside from Crocus and Rayleigh, none of the Roger Pirates knew either. Roger was never a great liar, but his undying spirit was something he kept under wraps, simply because calling himself an ‘alive’ entity just became less accurate by the day.

“Ray-san, why doesn’t the Captain have a heartbeat?”

Rayleigh hadn’t expected Buggy to be the one to find out about it first. The boy had approached him during his night watch one day, much too early for the cabin boy to be awake and much too late now for the boy to try sleeping again.

(And Rayleigh knew that when Buggy really wanted to know something, he would ask only once, when no one was around, like now.) 

None of the older members suspected a thing. Even if they did, they may have dismissed it as Roger’s yet unidentifiable illness marking its path through his veins.

“Why do you think so?” Rayleigh challenged him-- because he knew Buggy would hate that he learned this.

“I don’t just think so, I know so!” Buggy snapped, almost defensive, “I looked for a pulse yesterday. Dr Kureha taught me how, and. And there just. I couldn’t…”

And Rayleigh conceded. There was no dodging the question in this one. 

“Roger doesn’t have a heart,” he told him, not bothering to sugarcoat it. “It’s the first thing his illness went after, so we took it out.”

He didn’t tell Buggy the story of those days, when Roger would wake up with a pulsing heart, only to take two steps and seize once more. It would stop, and then it would beat again, only to succumb to the illness again in an endless, painful loop.

“But people can’t--!” Buggy’s words died in his throat.

He must've realized something that just clicked as if it made perfect sense.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” Rayleigh asked, his tone rhetoric. “His heart’s not growing back, but everything else in his body still works. Like normal.”

Buggy stayed in his room that day, even when Shanks pestered him to come out to play a prank, or when they were yelled at for skipping their chores. 

-

It’s a little known fact that Buggy apprenticed under Doctorine, if only on a whim for maybe a year or two.

He had been hiding, fascinated by her variety of herbs and concoctions, when Doctorine decided she wanted a helper. Roger had to sail back from Little Garden because he’d belatedly realized he wa missing a cabin boy.

“How do you think Rouge died?” 

And it’s even lesser known that Dr Kureha knew about the Ds.

“Dunno,” Buggy said, “burned her and scattered the ashes?”

That’s how the World Government dealt with D criminals, after all. It’s the most permanent way they know of, other than drowning or freezing them.

Baterilla was a good way to do all of the above, somehow.

(Though there are theories, that if you scattered them sparsely enough, they would still be able to rise again after a long regeneration. But that’s a myth in a myth.)

“Nope, childbirth,” Kureha said.

Buggy raised a brow. “No way.”

Kureha turned toward the window, her eyes trained on her little Chopper as he gathered useful leaves from the trees in the area.

“Why do you think people choose their deaths?” Kureha told him. 

Buggy’s instinctive answer was “mental illness of some sort, maybe,” to which Kureha barked out a laugh, but didn’t refute.

“Hiruluk was mentally ill alright,” Kureha said with a smirk. “But that’s not why he chose to die that day.”

Buggy raised a brow at that.

Hiruluk wasn’t a D-- the comparison hardly made sense.

(Or maybe it did.)

(In the same way that Kureha lives, simply because she doesn’t feel like dying yet. She’s not a D either, she just has the will to survive even today.)

No…if there was something Hiruluk and Rouge and even Roger had in common-- it was the fact that they died after doing something great.

Discover One Piece. Leave behind the Sakura of Winter. Defied biology and gave birth to the son of the Pirate King.

They died _content_ with themselves.

-

(Buggy liked to think that was how it was.)

(It was less sad that way.)

-

Buggy learned the rest on his own, through his own sources, and investigated until he was tired of learning.

Then he began to pretend he never knew.

Because that was what people saw him as-- the jester, the clown, the one that was to be underestimated, the one no one would expect knowledge and information to come from. 

He learned to satisfy his own curiosity, that was it.


End file.
